Digitising the World

For some companies, a digital asset management effort begins with analogue assets that need to be converted into digital form: movies, photographic negatives, printed reports, audio tapes. The conversion task can be time-consuming and expensive, forcing most companies to be selective about what they digitise. Coca-Cola has more than a million items in its archives, for instance. Mooney first moved to digitise those items that were likely to get the most use, such as Coke's first-ever newspaper ad that ran in 1886, its Norman Rockwell calendar art from the 1930s or that 1971 TV commercial that showed all those hippies singing on a hill.

Once a company picks what to put online, it has to decide how to describe its assets. "The hardest part is finding out what you have, identifying it and describing it properly in the system so it can be found later," says Andy Shenkler, director of the digital services group for EMI Recorded Music, which is using DAM software from Bulldog (a company acquired late last year by Documentum). The recording giant has populated a DAM system with its entire current audio catalogue - some 10,000 recordings, ranging from Beethoven's 5th to the Beatles' Abbey Road. Shenkler's group can enter basic meta-data elements - album name, artist, release date. But "there's no way for my group to know who was the fourth artist on a particular track", Shenkler says; that information has to come from the individual record label overseers. "Then there's the rights info - it changes track by track, and that has to be cleared by business affairs and legal."

Another major decision companies must make is who will access the digital assets and how. Given the current curb on IT spending, some companies decide to start out with a fairly small, department-level project. Other companies vary DAM access based on their comfort with the user audience. The US NFL, for example, makes game photographs and player head shots available to registered press members via a Web site, maintained by WebWare. WebWare is also building a B2B system for NFL licensees, who will be able to search for and download high-resolution images. The software generates a usage report, and then the NFL sends out a usage contract and a bill. Another NFL site being built for consumers, however, won't allow access to high-resolution photos; consumers will be able to search for images and then order photographic prints by mail.

IT resource constraints can also shape DAM deployment decisions. At Coca-Cola, Mooney wanted to offer high-resolution images and video for downloading, but the IS department baulked, saying it would bog down the corporate network. Instead, the DAM system serves as more of a catalogue. "We use the system to identify what we want and then use a third-party supplier to provide it on a Zip drive or CD," Mooney says.

"Then we send it via a more traditional way to our offices around the world." That may sound a bit Sneakernet-ish, but Mooney says it's an improvement. Anyone who needed access to the archives used to have to fly to Atlanta every time they wanted to scope out some vintage calendar art for a new T-shirt - or rely on Mooney to pick something suitable for them.

During the coming years, the IT infrastructure needed to support access to these digital assets will improve, IDC's Duhl says. When that happens, look for DAM systems to deliver natural language and other nifty forms of searching, such as matching an image or a few bars of a song (most systems today rely on keyword searches, he says, which have their limits). Digital rights management will also be an increasingly important feature for DAM customers, as they look to share content across the firewall. "There really aren't any standards there yet," says Garth Landers, a research analyst at Gartner (US).

Analysts see new markets for DAM in everything from corporate training to public safety (how else will US law enforcement agencies manage and analyse the thousands of hours of surveillance videos collected as part of the post-9/11 homeland security drive? Landers asks).

"Rich media is the last bastion of unmanaged information," Duhl says. It's also a fast-growing bastion of unmanaged information - all the more reason for CIOs to start paying attention to the DAM market.